Canonical ships Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with AI and security upgrades

Canonical released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon, on April 23, 2026. The company said the new long-term support release is available now from ubuntu.com/download and is aimed at enterprise workloads, AI development, and production systems.

In its announcement, Canonical said Ubuntu 26.04 LTS builds on the resilience-focused changes added in recent interim releases. The release includes TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities that are meant to improve memory safety.

The company also said Ubuntu 26.04 LTS now ships with native support for NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm. According to Canonical, that makes the release a stronger base for AI and machine learning work, both in development and in production.

Jon Seager, vice president of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical, said the release combines “optimizations for silicon, the kernel, and the cloud” with the latest upstream features. He said the goal is to bring open source software to whichever platform users choose.

On the desktop side, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS includes the latest GNOME desktop environment and a modernized set of default applications. Canonical said the release fully embraces Wayland, completing the upstream move away from X.org. The company said the switch brings smoother visuals, per-monitor scaling, native touch and gesture support, and less screen tearing, while also supporting the latest NVIDIA production drivers.

Canonical also said the release includes a broader set of accessibility fixes across the shell and default applications. The company said those changes are intended to help meet global regulations and improve the out-of-box experience.

Application management has also changed. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS introduces a unified software management experience in the App Center, with improved support for Debian packages. Canonical said that should make application handling more cohesive for users and administrators.

For developers, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with updated language toolchains and compilers. Canonical said that lets teams build modern applications without depending on third-party repositories.

On the hardware and infrastructure side, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is the first Ubuntu release to natively distribute NVIDIA CUDA through its repositories. Canonical also said users can install NVIDIA DOCA-OFED through an official PPA starting with this release. AMD’s ROCm software platform is now available in Ubuntu’s repositories as well.

Andrej Zdravkovic, senior vice president and chief software officer at AMD, said the software now arrives through a trusted Ubuntu package supply chain. He said that supports AI workloads on data center servers and also gives developers a simpler path for building and deploying on AMD laptops and desktops.

Canonical said Ubuntu Livepatch now extends rebootless kernel patching to Arm64 for the first time. Bhumik Patel, director of server ecosystem development in Arm’s Cloud AI Business Unit, said that lets organizations apply critical kernel updates on Arm64 servers and edge hardware without interrupting service.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS also adds support for RVA23, the baseline standard for RISC-V. Canonical said the update improves support for mixed-architecture environments. The release also includes guest and host support for confidential computing on Intel Trust Domain Extensions and AMD SEV, which Canonical said enables private AI workloads with silicon-level encryption.

At the kernel level, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is built on Linux 7.0, according to Canonical. The company said the kernel adds support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake, along with optimizations for Intel Xe3 integrated graphics and the integrated neural processing unit, or NPU.

For industrial and embedded systems, Canonical said the kernel now integrates the IgH EtherCAT Master module and Generic Ethernet driver. EtherCAT is a real-time industrial networking protocol, and Canonical said the change reduces integration work for engineers building motion control systems, robotics platforms, and factory automation.

Enterprise security features round out the release. Canonical said Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is the first LTS release to expand the number of memory-safe system components, including new kernel drivers and subsystems written in Rust, plus sudo-rs and uutils coreutils. The company said that includes memory-safe versions of tools such as sudo and ls.

TPM-backed full-disk encryption is now generally available in the Ubuntu installer. Canonical said tying encryption to the TPM chip binds the disk encryption to a specific device and makes physical access attacks harder.

The company also said field is integrated into the Ubuntu Desktop installer to simplify enterprise workstation provisioning. Authd, an open source authentication service that connects to cloud identity providers, is now available from official Ubuntu repositories. Canonical said it works with Entra ID, Google IAM, and any standard-compliant OIDC provider without extra infrastructure.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS also includes an updated WSL experience, with cloud-init and Ubuntu Pro for WSL. Canonical said that gives organizations a path for larger-scale management and security compliance through field.